Lunapads Blog

Please post below your favourite finds for socially responsible, handmade, local or upcycled gifts! We have a giveaway of a gift certificate to Cangles for one lucky person to select their very own bracelet!

Ah Christmas! A love/hate relationship for me. There are quaint pieces of it that I adore but a flip side of greed, stress and commercialization I do not enjoy one bit.

This year I have been looking for alternative gifts that give back in bigger ways or unique upcycled/recycled products. I also have a soft spot for artisans and crafters as I do have an artsy side myself. It has been so much fun researching ideas and there are a ton of really neat ones. Here are some of my favourites:

Cangles are a super neat recycled aluminum-can bangle. They sent us a couple to try, and we love them! Based in Michigan they make unique, green, quality-made jewelry and gifts. Their fashionably green jewelry design and construction is based on the 3 Rs: Reusing, Renewing & Recycling! Cangles is kindly sponsoring our giveaway with a gift certificate for one lucky reader so you can pick your very own Cangle!

Blend Creations has really neat stainless steel jewelry, including bracelets, necklaces, earrings, rings, and more! My personal favourites are the customizable Twitter @ symbol and QR code charms. As it turns out one of the owners is a BIG Lunapads fan and has been using our products for years! As many people tell me, Canada does come up with some pretty innovative products. (Lisa likes their ultra-functional honeycomb wrench necklace shown on the left.)

Socially conscious and charitable gifts are my favourite. One year, for my Dad (who is super hard to buy for). we sponsored a whale. He loved it! Here are a few other suggestions of unique and socially responsible gifts from me, and the Lunapads team:

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As regular readers will be aware, over the past decade Lunapads has been developing the Pads4Girls program to bring reusable feminine hygiene supply kits to thousands of girls and women in need in over 15 countries. Pads4Girls seeks to address an often-overlooked problem that hundreds of millions of girls and women in developing nations face: missing school or work for several days every month because they lack adequate menstrual hygiene supplies. You can learn more about the issue and its impact on our site here, and in the Pads4Girls section of our blog.

Trying to determine how to make a bigger impact with Pads4Girls from a distance only goes so far, and we feel called to learn more and go deeper. In January 2012 Suzanne and I will be traveling to Uganda with Shanti Uganda, a Vancouver-based charity that improves infant and maternal health, provides safe women-centered care and supports the well-being of birthing mothers and women living with HIV/AIDS in Uganda.

We are appealing to the Lunapads community to raise funds to enroll 300 teenage girls in Shanti Uganda’s At Risk Girls Program, a health and wellness program focused on inspiring futures for girls and teen mothers in Kasana Town Uganda. As part of the workshop, each girl will receive AFRIpads (Ugandan-made cloth pads based on Lunapads, see below for more information about them) and a health education manual.

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We’ve had a business crush on the fabulous team of RockinGreen soap company since they first hit our radar at the ABC Kids Show a few years ago. Here’s a picture of Madeleine and I with the RockinGreen team after a lovely breakfast with them in March 2011 at  Natural Products Expo West.  Since then the RockinGreen team has made even greater business strides, most recently acknowledged as “Fastest Growing Company of the Year” and its CEO, Kim Webb, as “Best Entrepreneur” at the 8th Annual Stevie Awards for Women in Business.

RockinGreen’s highly successful soap formula has clearly been a hit with cloth diapering enthusiasts all over the world. So, when we learned last spring that Kim was working on a formula for cloth pads, we couldn’t wait to try it out. Unveiled a few weeks ago, Femme Rock is now available at Lunapads for those who like to “Rock the Cloth”. To learn more about this fabulous product, I asked Kim a few questions.

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This is the first post in our new series where we introduce you to some of our fantastic retailers! Belinda Lowry is the owner of Homestead Hygiene located in Addy, Washington.  Her company specializes in sustainable products to help you take care of your laundry, hair care, body care and feminine hygiene needs as well as educating people on how to become more self-sufficient and  live a sustainable life that is best for health, economy and the environment.

When did you start your business?
We officially launched this year, 2011.  However, Homestead Hygiene has been a work in progress for about 4 years.

What made you decide to start your own business and what makes it unique?
We believe that sustainability is the way to go for a variety of reasons which include health, economy, environment and the changing future. We are not just another retailer out to catch the next band wagon.  We truly believe and live what we are promoting.  Our office is being built completely off-grid.  We utilize as much reusable products as possible and are always looking to find more ways to reduce, recycle and reuse.  We also care about our customers and want them to catch the vision and have a better life, not just buy our stuff.

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Gogo Bags is offering a starter kit including a sandwich, snack and a cutlery bag (value of $23) to one lucky reader! To enter: visit Gogobags.ca and tell us which Gogo Bag fabric is your fave in the comments! We’ll chose a winner on Friday November 25th.

Sierra Club estimates that North American families spend as much as $85 a year on disposable lunch baggies and millions of them are thrown out every day! That’s a lot of trash and a lot of money wasted on something that can easily be replaced with a reusable alternative.  Gogo Bags are one of our favorite reusable bag makers. They’ve kindly agreed to sponsor a giveaway for us (more info at the bottom of this post!) but first here’s the story behind this awesome Canadian Women-owned business:

GoGo Bags was created as a result of my daily struggles with packing lunch and snacks for my kids. I was looking for a durable, reusable bag made of 100% cotton inside and out and couldn’t find one. All the available options have either nylon lining or Velcro closing, which may not be food safe depending on the manufacturing of the fabric.

I teamed up with my mom (GoGo Bags’ master designer and expert in sewing) and together we created bags purely made of 100% cotton and nothing else.

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This is a copy of the guest blog post I wrote for the Social Venture Network blog:

Social Venture Network conference organizers have always been mindful of ensuring emerging issues from it’s members get a voice during the conference. After meeting Jackie Vanderbrug of Criterion Ventures at the Social Venture Institute at Hollyhock (a Canadian based offshoot of SVN) and briefly learning about Criterion’s work towards “Bringing a Gender Lens to Investing” I felt the SVN community would benefit from a deeper conversation on the topic.

So, I helped organize a Call to Action Roundtable with Joy Anderson of Criterion Ventures titled: “Investing in Women: how to increase women’s access to capital and invest in social entrepreneurs focused on improving the condition of women”. Much to our delight, over two dozen participants gathered over lunch to join in the lively conversation. With several other Roundtable conversations going on concurrently in the same room, we often had to raise our voices out of necessity (and perhaps passion!)

My own interest in the topic stems from my passion for advancing issues which affect women and entrepreneurship. It was over a decade ago when Lunapads learned that a progressive investment fund, Renewal Partners, was looking to invest in socially responsible businesses that were led by women and focused on women’s issues. I wanted to share with the SVN group my positive experience obtaining capital and dealing with our investors (Joel Solomon and Carol Newell, both long time members of SVN) and working with Vancity Capital for debt financing.

After Joy introduced her framework for the conversation, the group engaged in an enthusiastic conversation that centered around three common themes:

Make it easier for women to access capital: While all of the women entrepreneurs who attended the session had successfully attracted capital to finance their business, their experience and degree of ease in obtaining that capital varied.  It was positive to learn that the social capital market is growing rapidly, but very few funds are targeted to women, and fewer still target women within community development. “Providing women equal access to capital is both a question of equity and an untapped/under invested opportunity” emphasized Joy. Others expressed frustration with the archaic legal regulations that hamper the ability for the average person or groups of people to make small investments in women run businesses.

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To say that I was star-struck meeting Bitch Magazine founding Editor Andi Zeisler for the first time is a bit of an understatement. Although it continues to baffle me as to why, I realize that feminist media and cultural criticism is not everyone’s cup of tea. It’s definitely one of mine, though, and Andi is one of its most incisive proponents and voices. We were in Portland earlier this summer for the most excellent World Domination Summit and took the opportunity to stop by the magazine’s offices.

Lunapads has recently entered into a more wide-ranging and intentional relationship as “Ambassadors” with Bitch Media, Bitch magazine’s nonprofit parent organization, and as such are seeking to broaden support for their work within our community. With that in mind, please consider subscribing, advertising, donating, volunteering and/or just plain old spreading the good word!

Andi and I took a look at a couple of different areas where women’s health, consumer products and questionable media messages intersect: namely, some current ad campaigns for feminine hygiene products and hormonal birth control.

To hear Andi deconstruct the subtle-yet-insidious phoniness that underlies that UbyKotex campaign was particularly heartening to me, as it seems to have been well-received by many progressive women, who welcomed its message while leaving its products unquestioned. (Also see Suzanne’s post about how UbyKotex claims to have invented the notion of groovy-looking menstrual pads, an idea that Lunapads has been championing for almost 2 decades!)

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It is fabulous to see the response to the previous post about holistic options for yeast infections. Author and Medical Herbalist Katolen Yardley has taken the time to respond to readers’ comments and provide more detail, in particular to questions about the safety and effectiveness of douching, yoghurt, Tea Tree essential oil and common OTC (over the counter) mainstream remedies.

Katolen writes:

Reviewing some of the comments from readers it is apparent that clarification is needed regarding certain terminology and to ascertain whether we are at the same starting place. Of course an accurate diagnosis should always be sought before ANY steps are taken with remedying one’s ailment, always. The purpose of the post is to provide numerous tools and resources for women – not only just pharmaceutical options – once she knows that a yeast infection exists.

Effectiveness is easy to assess. Yeast infections are disruptive, uncomfortable and annoying. If one has a yeast infection, ANY relief is welcome and one will quickly be able to assess what is helping and making a difference and what is not. Perhaps one of the best ways to assess how home remedies work, is to try them out and have a personal experience. Feedback from clients, students and customers all indicate that herbal remedies DO WORK.

Many women have encountered the endless cycle of using OTC medications and find that they are NOT addressing the problem, and the yeast infection comes back – this is when many women become frustrated with mainstream medical treatments and often start investigating other holistic options. Herbal remedies are tried and true (they do not work for everyone all the time, yet they are an option) – their effectiveness is known through trying them. They are gentle and one will quickly know if they are providing relief.

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Suzanne and I happened to meet Katolen Yardley MNIMH, a Medical Herbalist, a few weeks ago at a dinner party. She caught our attention immediately with her vibrant personality and passion for women’s health. She is also the owner of the Alchemy & Elixir Wellness Centre in downtown Vancouver. We were thrilled when she agreed to provide her expertise as a holistic medical professional on helping women deal with a common issue, yeast infections. Check out her easy and effective natural tips below!

A typical yeast infection, also known as candida albicans, is a fungus normally present in the body in small amounts. The presence of other healthy flora keeps the bodies levels of candida albicans in check, however the vaginal flora is very sensitive, responding immediately to any changes in our environment.  If any triggers disrupt the sensitive balance of good and bad bacteria, candida albicans can flourish.

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One of Suzanne and my favorite things about working at Lunapads is being involved in a vibrant community of women entrepreneurs.

One of the most remarkable ones to have have crossed out path recently is Natalie Sisson of Womanzworld, founder of the Suitcase Entrepreneur movement. Natalie’s gig is finding online tools to help people run their businesses from pretty much anywhere in the world, and she does a fine job in setting the example herself. An uber social media savvy consultant, she has been a great help in taking the Lunapads social media practice to the proverbial next level. We have also enjoyed hearing about her current experience of life in Buenos Aires via Facebook, and looking forward to meeting her in person at the upcoming World Domination Summit in Portland OR.

When Natalie approached us about doing an interview about our journey as entrepreneurs, she sent us some great questions:

Check out the video to find out the answers!